The present invention relates in general to enhancing input/output and storage capability of the electronic subsystems within an electronics rack(s) of a data center, including rack-mounted assemblages of individual electronics units, such as rack-mounted computer server units.
An electronics rack, such as a high-end computer rack, may employ multiple computer server units within the rack. Each computer server unit is an example of an electronic subsystem and may include one or more processors, memory, input/output (I/O) adapters and one or more computer storage devices. Depending upon the implementation, additional input/output capacity or storage capacity may be desired than can be provided within the individual computer server unit(s) of the rack. For example, to allow ever-high throughput and heavy virtualization that high-end computer systems are capable of implementing, additional I/O adapter slots and additional device storage slots than can currently be accommodated within a computer server unit of the electronics rack are desired. In addition, virtualized servers typically require dedicated, local, non-volatile disk storage for each logical partition.